The Trump administration has discarded more than $800 million in research into the health of LGBTQ people, abandoned research into cancer and viruses that tend to affect members of sexual minority groups, and has boosted efforts to beat the revival of sexually transmitted diseases, according to an analysis of federal data by the New York Times.
In line with deep opposition to both diversity programs and adolescent gender maintenance care, the administration has worked actively to eradicate stock measures and research that touches transgender health.
But that crackdown echoes far beyond these issues, eliminating the scope of medical research on diseases that disproportionately afflict LGBTQ people. This is the group that makes up nearly 10% of American adults.
According to reviews from the era of all ending grants, out of 669 grants that early in May or at least 323 (almost half of that) cancelled in whole or in part in early May in relation to LGBTQ Health.
Federal officials had allocated $806 million to cancelled projects, many of which were expected to raise more funds over the next few years.
Many research institutions lost funds. This list includes not only White House targets like Johns Hopkins and Columbia, but also southern and Midwest public universities such as Ohio State University and the University of Alabama in Birmingham.
Florida State University has cancelled a $41 million worth of research, including major efforts to prevent HIV in adolescents and young adults who experience five-fifths of new infections in the United States each year.
In a cancellation letter for the past two months, the NIH justified the cuts by telling scientists that LGBTQ jobs “no longer affect agency priorities.” In some cases, the agency said the cancelled research was “based on gender identity,” resulting in “unscientific” results that ignored “biological reality.”
Other firing letters told scientists they made the mistake by “based on artificial and unscientific categories primarily containing amorphous equity goals.”
The cuts follow a surge in federal funding for LGBTQ research over the past decade and a positive encouragement from the NIH for the proposal for grants that focused on sexual and gender minority groups that began during the Obama administration.
President Trump's allies argue that the research will be shot for ideological bias.
“There was a line of science abuse to match the conclusion of preconceived notions,” said Roger Severino of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that helped develop Trump administration policies.
“It was based on the unscientific premise that biology is virtually irrelevant, and the political project that tried to make the notion that people can change sex a mainstream.”
Scientists said cancelling research on such a wide range of diseases associated with sexual and gender minority groups effectively created a hierarchy of patients of greater value than other patients.
“Certain people in the United States should not be treated as second-rate research subjects,” said Simon Rosser, a professor at the University of Minnesota, before the lab was studying cancer in LGBTQ people, before a significant amount of funds were withdrawn.
“I think that's the definition of who's bias,” he added. “Prejudices in science.”
The cancelled project is one of the most vivid symptoms of the extensive demolition of infrastructure that has supported medical research throughout the United States for 80 years.
In addition to completing the study, federal officials created the grants through slow payment payments, postponing the grant review meeting, and expanding the new grant awards.
On Friday, Trump proposed cutting the NIH budget from around $48 billion to $27 billion. This cites part of what has been described as an agency's efforts to promote “radical gender ideology.”
The legality of end-of-mass is unknown. Two separate lawsuits challenge the cancellation of the wide range of grants — one filed by a group of researchers and the other by 16 states — alleged that the Trump administration did not provide a legal basis for the cuts.
The White House and the Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to requests for comment.
Health Ministry spokesman Andrew Nixon told conservative publication Daily Signal last month that he “is following the president's executive orders” “behind politicized day and gender ideology research.”
In a statement, NIH said: “NIH is taking steps to terminate research funding that does not align with the priorities of the NIH and HHS. We are dedicated to restoring our traditions that support science based on the evidence of the gold standard.”
LGBTQ has concluded studies on antibiotic resistance, undiagnosed autism in sexual minority groups, and certain throat and other cancers that affect disproportionately in those groups. The loss of funds has led to layoffs in several LGBTQ-centric labs that were preparing to expand recently.
The NIH was used to book grant cancellations for rare cases of research misconduct or potential harm to participants. Scientists said the latest cuts, far from protecting research participants, are harming them instead.
They cited the waiver of clinical trials, where federal funds are run out of funds to care for volunteer participants.
“We're stopping what prevents suicide and prevents sexual violence,” said Katie Edwards, a professor at the University of Michigan, who has cancelled funding for several clinical trials involving LGBTQ people.
The HIV study was particularly hard hit.
NIH has concluded several major grants to the Adolescent Medical Exam Network for HIV/AIDS interventions. This is a program that helped lay the foundation for the use of medication therapy in adolescents that can prevent infection.
A regimen known as pre-exposure prevention, or PREP, is believed to help defeat the disease in young people.
The program cuts look to reduce spread of HIV in young sexual minority men who use stimulants by examining a continuous trial of products that prevent both HIV and pregnancy, as well as a combination of sexual health counseling and behavioral therapy.
With the end of dozens of other HIV studies, the cuts have undermined Trump's goals from his first term in office to end the country's HIV epidemic within a decade, scientists said.
NIH has also completed work on other sexually transmitted diseases.
Dr. Matthew Spinelli, an infectious disease researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, was in the middle of a clinical trial of doxycycline, a common antibiotic taken after aspiration after sex.
The trial said, “there are nerds that you get”: a randomized study given to participants to be given a different regimen of antibiotics and to see how it is metabolized.
He hopes the findings will help scientists understand the effectiveness of drugs in women, and it also potentially causes drug resistance, a concern that Secretary of State Marco Rubio has spoken up in the past.
However, health officials stopped funding for the March experiment, citing opposition to research on “gender identity.” So Dr. Spinelli didn't pay federal funds to monitor half a dozen people who were already taking antibiotics.
He also risked wasting the thousands of doses that Dr. Spinelli bought with taxpayer money. He said stopping jobs for illnesses like syphilis and HIV will allow new outbreaks to spread.
“The HIV epidemic will explode again as a result of these actions,” Dr. Spinelli said. “It's devastating for the affected communities.”
Despite a recent emphasis on the downsides of the transition, federal officials have cancelled several grants examining the potential risks of gender-maintaining hormone therapy. The project looked into whether hormone therapy could increase the risk of breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, brain development, or HIV, for example
Other fired grants have looked at ways to deal with mental illness in transgender people. Transgender people currently account for around 3% of high school students, reporting a significantly higher rate of persistent grief and suicide attempts.
For Dr. Edwards of the University of Michigan, funding for clinical trials has been suspended for one of her six cancelled studies, how depression and self-harm in transgender teens, can be curtailed.
Another examined interventions to promote more supportive care for LGBTQ youth families and reduce youth dating violence and alcohol use.
The NIH classifies studies only by specific illnesses, making it difficult for agents to know how much money they will devote to LGBTQ health. However, the March report estimates that such studies account for less than 1% of the NIH portfolio for a decade.
The Times sought to understand the scale of end funding for LGBTQ medical research by reviewing the title. There were often research summaries for each of the 669 grants that the Trump administration said had cancelled all or part of it in early May.
The age included in counting studies designed to recruit participants from sexual and gender minorities, beyond grants related to LGBTQ people and disproportionate sacrifices.
We excluded grants related to diseases such as HIV, focusing on non-LGBTQ patients.
The Times only looked into NIH research grants, but it is also considering that the Trump administration has terminated or terminated LGBTQ programs elsewhere in the federal health system. For example, it proposes discarding specialized suicide hotlines for LGBTQ youth.
The reduction in research has endured hollowing out areas that have not only grown over the past decade but have come to cover a wide range of disease threats beyond HIV.
Already, scientists say that young researchers have lost their jobs in researching sexual and gender minorities and are scrubbing online biographies of evidence that they have worked in the field.
The five grants obtained by Brittany Charlton, a professor at Harvard School of Public Health, have been cancelled, including one that considers a significant rate of stillbirth rise among LGBTQ women.
Ending research into the threat of illness to gender and sexual minority groups would inevitably restore the entire population, she said. “When other people get sick around you, it affects you even if you think you won't,” she said.
Irena Hwang contributed to the report.
